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AMD Catalyst Will Not Support Wayland Anytime Soon

08-20-2012, 02:30 PM

Phoronix: AMD Catalyst Will Not Support Wayland Anytime Soon

Last week we heard news that NVIDIA is at least evaluating support for their binary graphics driver with Wayland, but on the AMD Catalyst binary driver side it doesn't look like they will be supporting the next-generation Linux display architecture "anytime soon", according to a reliable source...

Some people might disagree with me, but I don't really see this as shocking. Let's talk Wayland in Ubuntu terms:

Ubuntu 12.10: no Wayland
Ubuntu 13.04: maybe some XWayland usage with open source drivers
Ubuntu 13.10: now XWayland should definitly be included for open source drivers
Ubuntu 14.04: no change because it's an LTS release
Ubuntu 14.10: first possibility of using Wayland completely without Xorg (XWayland)

So it's not as if Wayland is just around the corner anyway. They will change their minds in a year or two.

Comment

I think it would be a HUGE mistake for AMD to support wayland through blob driver. Open source drivers are THE WAY to support Linux, and moving forward, should be the ONLY way. This will push a lot more people into the open source drivers and result in a more consistent and more functional experience.

Comment

I think it would be a HUGE mistake for AMD to support wayland through blob driver. Open source drivers are THE WAY to support Linux, and moving forward, should be the ONLY way. This will push a lot more people into the open source drivers and result in a more consistent and more functional experience.

This. Looking at the radeon driver, we'll get 2D acceleration, some OpenGL support and basic power saving that will sometimes work on 6 years old card by 2020. That is so the way to go...

Comment

AMD not aggressively supporting Wayland isn't entirely surprising since new Linux-specific
features to the Catalyst driver tend to come rather slow, even when it comes to supporting
new Linux kernel and X.Org Server releases that generally require small modifications to
support the new API/ABI. Generally this support doesn't come until the change is necessitated
by Ubuntu or one of AMD's supported enterprise Linux distributions (i.e. Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and SUSE Linux Enterprise).